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<title>Queen Takes by ForASecondThereWedWon</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27608875">Queen Takes</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/ForASecondThereWedWon/pseuds/ForASecondThereWedWon'>ForASecondThereWedWon</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Oh my god, they were checkmates... [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Queen's Gambit (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>(again), Celebrations, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, My First Work in This Fandom, Post-Canon, Reunions, oops I binge-watched TQG, rated for sexual content</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-07 02:07:37</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,940</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27608875</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/ForASecondThereWedWon/pseuds/ForASecondThereWedWon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>With Beth home from Moscow, her friends gather to celebrate her achievement. One guest arrives late.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Beth Harmon/Benny Watts</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Oh my god, they were checkmates... [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2020483</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>47</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>494</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Queen Takes</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p><i>You're the one that I long to kiss/Baby, you're the one that I really miss</i> - The Vogues</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The colour of Kentucky feels like a trick after Moscow. Her blue home—her mother’s home—is a playhouse, not the American standard it’s masquerading as. Sure, Russia with its cold, with its blacks and browns across the walls of the hotel where she stayed and on the jackets of the old men in the park, is striving for a monopoly on drab stoicism, but Beth Harmon passed her early years in a trailer as silver as a bare tin can. You can find barrenness anywhere, even inside a person.</p><p>Across the coffee table, Jolene looks back at Beth like she knows what she’s thinking, those morbid thoughts. Beth can hear the smooth crack of her friend’s voice in her head. It’s… comforting, the sense that someone can simultaneously have no time and all the time in the world for her. Jolene’s eyes don’t tell her she’s a fool for taking so long to recognize love or a genius for refusing the draw (plus everything before and after)—they just say, <em>nice dress</em>. Subtly, Beth raises her Coke and inclines it towards her friend. <em>Thanks</em>.</p><p>Matt and Mike are keeping her living room balanced, one twin on either couch. Harry’s moving his hands with precision and intensity as he reiterates the brilliance of Beth’s endgame over Borgov, though Jolene is laughing at him, laughing in airy howls, because she has no interest in chess. Unlike Alma/Mrs. Wheatley/Mother, Jolene does not possess the patience to sit and listen while Beth unravels her win, move by move. How different is a friend from a sister, a sister from a mother, a mother from another mother again. This is fine. Beth, smiling, admires her guests and accepts that she has quite enough chess-lovers in her life.</p><p>There’s a knock at the door.</p><p>Jolene’s laugh cuts off like there should be a blade dangling in midair.</p><p>“Well,” she says to Beth, “go get him.”</p><p>“He’s worse than any of these three,” Beth warns with a smile, stalling and hopefully concealing the waver in her words, hands, and heartbeat.</p><p>“I’m anticipating a sanctimonious pain in the ass, and that’s just from the articles I read about you playing him.”</p><p>“You could’ve met him in New York,” Mike says as Beth gets a grip on herself and the couch, pushing up and striding with sudden purpose to the front door.</p><p>“Fight New York City traffic in my nice car? Just to sit in some dirty concrete basement? All of you talking nothing but chess?” She huffs a laugh from her nose. “Even when I was an orphan, I had better things to do than that.”</p><p>Beth’s heart is doing something painful and distracting in her chest and she misses any rejoinder the boys might have made, though she wouldn’t advise one. Very few people are so much their own person as Jolene is. Very few. Her hand is clammy on the knob as she takes hold and swings the door open. He doesn’t speak, and yet she hears, again, his voice down the long, long line, reaching her in her hotel room the night before the final. He doesn’t even smile.</p><p>“Benny,” Beth breathes, and collapses into him when he greets her with a startling kiss that captures the remainder of her oxygen. Her eyebrows raise when he pulls back. “I wasn’t expecting that.”</p><p>His gaze dips down to her dress and back to her face. Now, he smiles.</p><p>“I guess I’m playing white.”</p><p>She narrows her eyes.</p><p>“What happened to determining sides with an impartial method?”</p><p>“Don’t have any pieces on me to hide in my hands. You wouldn’t happen to have a board in the house, would you?”</p><p>Beth smiles again and holds the door wide to let Benny enter her home. She sees his car tucked against the curb out front. Likely, it contains his hat. His head is uncovered.</p><p>“And that was fair, by the way,” he whispers as she walks him into the living room. “When have you known me to skip a chance at making the first move?”</p><p>With the addition to the party, there are fresh drinks to be poured, trips to the bathroom to be taken, and things are shuffled around some until Jolene joins Beth on one couch, the twins and Benny opposite. He’s slung his leather jacket over the back of the couch and elects to sit forward. With his elbows braced on his thighs in this way and fingers intertwined in the space between, he could be contemplating one of their many games. But it’s her he looks at—staring straight across with a steadiness she can’t match in front of the others.</p><p>Jolene and Benny swap remarks, her judgements a strange and wonderful counter for the way he has always spoken in foregone conclusions. She calls him by his full name every time, just the way she told Beth she read it. As the afternoon stretches and Jolene’s career ambitions take their place in the conversation, Benny begins to call her ‘Esquire’. Beth looks on warily. Jolene breaks into a slow smile and nods her permission with a proud bob of her chin.</p><p>They bring out the cake she’s been pretending not to know about. Once, on a plane, she told her mother that a Houston tournament would take first place in her life’s Christmases; well, this feels like the best birthday she’s ever had and she doesn’t even have to age for it. Beth only cries at moments of excruciating frustration or when she is ambushed by emotion, no escape route of three moves prepared, so, naturally, the tears spill over.</p><p>“<em>You</em>. <em>You</em> did this,” Jolene insists, firm hold on her shoulders as she rocks Beth side to side on the couch.</p><p>Beth can only sniffle and smile down at the cake, chocolate, as Benny wields a knife (from a drawer in the kitchen) to slice uneven pieces. It’s heavenly. Despite high hopes of leftovers and sending each guest home with a slice, the six of them devour the cake. Harry chases the last crumbs around his plate, Matt groans and kicks his feet up on the table in search of relief for his overstuffed stomach, and Beth lies on the floor, raking her fork lazily through the icing before raising it to her lips and licking the tines clean. It’s only the pleasure of the day she means to extend with this exercise, but she can feel Benny’s eyes on her. Black makes <em>its</em> opening move.</p><p>She hugs each of her friends at the door as they drag themselves away. The alternative is to risk passing out across her chic living room set, and she hasn’t offered to let them stay. If any of them asked, she certainly would, but no one is at a loss for where they’ll be spending the night and they’re all—Beth knows—too aware of the car parked out front with the New York plates to want to intrude.</p><p>“You’re a queen,” Jolene says. She’s the final person to fold her into a hug. “You deserve this and more. And I bet,” she adds, dropping her voice so it’s just for Beth, not Benny, standing at the picture window and watching the boys drive away, “tonight’s going to feel even better than when you wiped Ohio with his skinny ass. Or whatever the hell happened between the two of you since then.”</p><p>Beth draws back, hands still on her friend’s waist, and gives her a look.</p><p>“Please,” Jolene begs, “it’s obvious. You’re World Champion and I am staring at the only thing Benny Watts wants to win.” She leans in with a conspiratorial smile. “This and more, Cocksucker.”</p><p>Laughing out loud, they break apart. Beth’s flushed as she waves from the doorway, arm making a wide sweep over her head, tears of gratitude welling up as her friend peels away. She dabs beneath her eyes with her fingers. She shuts the door. She flicks her eyes to Benny as she sidles around the little bit of wall separating the living room from the front room, dominated by her mother’s piano.</p><p>“I threw up in that one,” Beth volunteers, pointing out a silver cup trophy to Benny as he turns from the window. He shoots her a critical look.</p><p>“And the papers all say you’re so glamorous.”</p><p>“Everyone’s different in their own home.”</p><p>Benny gives a sideways nod to concede this.</p><p>“<em>You’re</em> different, I think,” she ventures. She’s less sure now, skirting the piano to come closer to him. “Like you might actually sit down.”</p><p>“I sit down,” he protests.</p><p>“For something other than a journalist.”</p><p>“I sat on your couch for hours.”</p><p>“Like you might actually stay.”</p><p>Him not entertaining her with flimsy attempts to leave, to find a hotel for the night, was his move. This boldness is Beth’s. Will he laugh at her? He could. She wonders if Harry ever mentioned to Benny that he did a stint as her roommate.</p><p>“Are you going to pull something inflatable out of someplace and condemn me to blowing it up?”</p><p>She laughs under her breath.</p><p>“No. You’re welcome to come upstairs.”</p><p>There are dishes, a light left on in the kitchen, but this mess is unlike what she did to the space herself while drunk. <em>This</em> scene is simply lived-in. Beth ignores the dishes and the light, eyes locked on Benny. It isn’t ‘now or never’ with him like it was with Harry—with Benny, it’s then and again. He brushes by her at the piano, the way he would in his New York apartment before they began sleeping together; the more he made sure not to touch her, the smaller the space felt. The near-collisions alone nearly drove her mad, she didn’t need chess for that. But when he’s almost past her, his fingertips connect with her skin and trickle down her arm to take her hand. Beth exhales with a smile. His middlegame remains the least predictable stage of his play.</p><p>Though she’s made the master bedroom her own, she turns the other way at the top of the stairs, right instead of left, wanting to show him where she studied and learned. He lets himself be pushed back onto her flowered bedspread. She indicates the torn mesh canopy overhead as she staggers forward on her knees to sit astride him and he hikes the black dress up her thighs. As he reaches for her back and unzips her—Beth tilting accommodatingly towards his chest—she talks ceiling visualization. How she found it, how she mastered it, how she got it back in Moscow. She waits for Benny to parrot her annoyance over discussing chess at a time like this, but he wears an empathetic smirk. Following leisurely minutes of undressing each other—“Slow down, Harmon, this isn’t speed chess”—that smirk is just about all he wears.</p><p>His necklaces glide across her chest as he kisses her neck. When he slips his hand between her legs, she invokes touch-move, insisting he finish what he’s started. Play progresses from there. <em>This is all mine</em>, she thinks, feeling Benny, denting a pink pillowcase with her clutching hands.</p><p>They’ve written her up as someone who attacks early and with ferocity. She lunges and thrusts, she likes control. ‘Out for blood,’ ‘killer instinct’—they make her something more than human. In her time, she’s been a talent, a prodigy, a virtuoso, a wunderkind. All of that’s become a bit mechanical. Have they forgotten, or have they never understood? Beth swipes her fingers through Benny’s hair as they catch their breath.</p><p>Chess can also be beautiful.</p>
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